Efforts to contain the oil have been made easier in the past 24 hours due to calm weather and dry conditions, officials said, but some are concerned about the potential for poor weather this afternoon, noting that it could complicate containment efforts.

The river, already running high due to the several days of heavy rain late last week, cannot take much more water before running over its banks in areas, EPA officials said. More water would also cause the flow of the river to increase, putting stress on containment equipment.

“It won’t help, but we are prepared,” Steve Wuori, vice president of pipelines for Enbridge, said of more rain.

The National Weather Service is calling for numerous showers and possibly severe thunderstorms for the area this afternoon.

Officials from Enbridge Inc. are planning to conduct helicopter flyovers Wednesday afternoon to determine the extent of the oil spill into the Kalamazoo River.

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At a press conference late Wednesday morning in Battle Creek, company officials said the last flyovers were conducted at 10 p.m. Tuesday.

At that time, while scanning the river during a helicopter flyover, company officials observed that the oil had reached just west of the Fort Custer State Recreation Area near Augusta, about 20 miles downstream from the spill site in Marshall Township.

As of noon Wednesday, no additional helicopter runs had been made.

“We are planning on doing multiple chopper runs today,” said Patrick Daniel, president and chief executive officer of Enbridge, which owns the pipeline that runs between Griffith, Ind., and Sarnia, Ontario. “Our commitment is to return the community and the waterways to their original state. You have our commitment to do that.”

The company is planning today to add 10 more boom sites to the 10 already in place along the river, mostly in Calhoun County. Those additional sites will be located near the spill site and between Fort Custer and Morrow Lake.

Workers have installed three booms in the eastern part of Comstock Township.

Of the 45,000 feet of boom the company has on-hand, 14,000 feet have so far been deployed, the company said.

“We want to contain this as much as possible before it gets to the lake,” said Ralph Dollhopf, senior on-scene coordinator with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “We don’t want to have to clean up oil from the lake.”